Marine Le Pen has ambitions for her party that stretch way beyond next year’s presidential election

UP CLOSE, the most unnerving thing about Marine Le Pen is not her obsession with Islam, her populism or her divisive politics—but the way she oozes charm. With a ready laugh and unaffected manner, this steely politician deflects awkward questions with an easy grace that makes her a rarity in French politics. The newish leader of the far-right National Front is an intriguing study in how to make extremist politics marketable—and in doing so, perhaps to reshape French party politics.

In the short run, Ms Le Pen wants to decontaminate the National Front, stripping it of the skin-headed image it had under her father, Jean-Marie. At the party's annual May 1st rally, she surrounded herself with fresh-faced young women in jeans and T-shirts. Her father, a former paratrooper, perfected a line in anti-Semitic and xenophobic outrage. She shares much of his programme, such as support for the death penalty and job preference for French nationals. But she has junked the anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi sidekicks in favour of a subtler tone. “When I talk about the immigration problem, I don't talk out of hate, or xenophobia, or Islamophobia, or fear,” she insists, but pragmatism. “We cannot afford to let everybody in.”

By turns funny and caustic, with a fine sense of oratory, Ms Le Pen's skill is to defend her ideas with principles that all voters share. She is “not against Islam”, she claims, but against the “Islamification” of society that breaches France's principle of laïcité (secularism). “I don't believe that Islam is incompatible with Western values,” she says. “But sharia law is, and that's what fundamentalists want to impose in France.” All of this is done with an unspoken appeal to common sense. Look at me, she seems to say, an ordinary divorced mother trying to bring up my kids at a tough time, how could you disagree?

Ms Le Pen is shaking the French establishment. Repeated polls suggest that she may well repeat her father's feat in 2002 by securing a place in the run-off at next year's presidential election. If she does, she will not win, but she could take almost a third of the votes. In any case, she will cause trouble by robbing support from both left and right, creating huge uncertainty ahead of 2012. In the long run, she has set her sights even higher: she wants to overturn party alignments and transform the National Front from a party of protest into a future party of government.

Across Europe, traditional divisions between left and right have blurred, Ms Le Pen argues, giving way to a new fracture between those who believe in globalisation, international governance and open borders, and those who believe in the primacy of the nation. In her eyes President Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF and a likely Socialist candidate, are “interchangeable”: standard-bearers for a globalised world view. By contrast, she wants a return to national sovereignty, a withdrawal from the euro (“before it collapses”) and NATO (“submission to America”), the return of border controls and an unapologetic protectionist policy to “re-industrialise France”.

If Mr Sarkozy loses in 2012, Ms Le Pen hopes for an “implosion” of his party, and a “recomposition” of politics. The aim is to shed the far-right label and turn the National Front into a majority party with support across the spectrum. It would draw not only on anti-immigrant feeling but on latent French Euroscepticism and disillusion with the elite. This might be dismissed as fanciful dreaming by an untried leader. Yet polls show that she has become the most popular choice for working-class voters and is winning support among the young and middle-class, not ashamed to support her as they were her father.

Even some opponents acknowledge her skills. “We can see clearly where she is going,” says Manuel Valls, a Socialist on his party's modernising wing. “She wants to create a new party on the right, and we on the left might find that harder to deal with.” Nonna Mayer, at Sciences-Po university, says “she is here to stay. She has already managed to make the party appear more respectable. The question is whether she can now make it credible.”

For under scrutiny, many of Ms Le Pen's ideas, when not toxic, are deeply flawed. France cannot compete with China on cost, she says, so better to put up borders, go for a competitive devaluation and start building factories at home again. She dismisses worries about the colossal cost of protectionism or of debt-servicing with a devalued currency as scaremongering. For now, such details have yet to spoil the seductive simplicity of her message. And this will keep her a highly disruptive figure in the run-up to 2012 and beyond.